Pointed

The 2022 general election is about a month away. Accordingly, the new Voters' Pamphlet arrived in the mail yesterday, and I spent some time looking through it. Washington is a Blue state, and so I started out by looking at the entries for Republican candidates around the state.

For the most part, it was a litany of Republican talking points; taxes are too high, crime is out of control, families (specifically, it seems) can't afford their needs due to inflation, the pandemic response was mishandled, illegal immigration threatens everyone, and the like. "Make America Great Again" rhetoric was mostly avoided, although House of Representatives candidate Matt Larkin tossed in "Make Crime Illegal Again." There was also quite a bit of "I'll fight for you" rhetoric, which always strikes me as strange; but I get it, people lap that stuff up. There weren't quite as many first-time candidates for elected office as I had expected, but there were a handful. (Interestingly, there were no political novices on the Democratic side.) Only one of the candidates made reference to the Republican article of faith that there was electoral cheating going on, and references to the new Republican boogeyman of "CRT" were mostly indirect references to things like "parents' rights."

Abortion wasn't quite absent from the pamphlet, but only one of the Republican candidates had anything to say directly about it, noting that "Newborn Washington babies can be murdered as they are being born." Another of the Republicans' perhaps understanding a need to better "read the room" in a Democratic-leaning state, noted "I will defend women's reproductive rights." Interestingly, this was one of the small group of female Republicans in the pamphlet, and, judging from their photographs, possibly the only non-White of the group. (Although another of the four Republican women may also have been non-White.) She was also the only candidate who made an explicit pitch for the "middle."

Senate Candidate Tiffany Smiley, at the top of the ticket, avoided the talking points entirely, choosing to stick with her primary election strategy of presenting a generically uplifting personal story, rather than any indications of what policies she might favor. (The Smiley campaign saves that for the website.)

Because of the format of Washington primary elections, it's possible for two candidates from the same party to face on another in the general election, and so one race had two Republican candidates. It stood out from the others in the complete absence of the typical taking points.

Again, I am convinced that one of the main things one learns from the Voters' Pamphlet is how the various campaigns see the voters they're attempting to communicate it. The Republican candidates avoided explicit "Trumpiness," and mostly stayed away from the "hot-button political issues" that would lead to negative contrasts with the Democrats. They also stayed away from direct attacks, tending to be critical of policy positions that others have done the work of linking to the Democratic party and/or the Biden Administration. I think the lesson that Republicans took away from the primaries is that while it's fine to talk to their own voters in the language of their fears and distrust, going all the way to full culture-war rhetoric would alienate the less-conservative voters they would need to attract in order to actually win elections. We'll see how well it works in a month's time.

Stand-Ins

It's a familiar story; a media company takes a property that has a large and devoted fan base, makes some or other change designed mainly to appear to modern sensibilities, a bunch of said fan base becomes upset, and this is taken as proof of their hatefulness on the part of those fans. Whether its a Black elf in The Rings of Power, or Scooby Doo's Velma Dinkley crushing on a girl, the pattern is always pretty much the same.

So as to not have any elephants in the room, I'm going to mention that when racial or sexual minorities are recast as straight White people, any anger is considered justified. But that's not really what I'm concerned with here.

What I'm interested in is the switch from this being considered "tokenism" to being "representation." Personally, I'm old, and so a lot of these instances still feel like tokenism to me. I find them lazy, mainly because they take advantage of the fact that so many fans are desperate to see someone like themselves in certain media properties that companies can rack up points more or less instantly with these sorts of insertions, which don't call for actually doing any of the world or character-building work that building these sort of characters would normally entail. Granted, in some instances, it can be made to make sense. In the various iterations of the Scooby Doo franchise, the characters have always been more or less sexless, only the Cartoon Network crossover with Johnny Bravo having any indication that the characters even knew was sex was, let alone had active attractions to other human beings. The various Scooby Doo shows were, after all, children's television, and any mention of sexuality tended to be strictly verboten. This is what made Cartoon Network's winking nods funny, the absurdity of adult characters being so chaste as to be effectively neuter.

Of course, the problem is that while there are minority and queer elements to many fandoms, they aren't particularly large. In the nearly 30 years since Milestone Media was founded, its comic universe has barely made a peep. Only one character, Static Shock, managed to find any mainstream success, and, if my last trip to a comic-book store is any indication, he's faded back into obscurity. I know that I, as a Black comic book fan, didn't find the characters to be particularly compelling. For me, the miss was that they were Black super-heroes, rather than being Black super-heroes. Sure, Marvel and DC tended to trade in tired tropes and stereotypes in their characters, but at least the things the characters were doing were worth reading.

But I'm an outlier in that sense; questions of Black identity, and the difficulties of fitting those questions into a world with superhumans in it don't really intrigue me. But there are, from what I understand, a lot of people for whom those sorts of stories are supposed to be compelling. Why were they not buying these comics?

There is a part of me that sees various groups seeking representation, even in small ways, in popular media properties, not because they want to see themselves, but because they want other people to see them. Legacy media properties have built-in audiences who are going to see a Black elf in Tolkien's Middle Earth, or a bisexual/lesbian Velma in Scooby Doo.

In in a situation like that, a new character, or a new franchise, simply doesn't have the pull required. Black people may not have purchased Milestone titles in large numbers, but White comic fans could be forgiven for never even knowing the company existed. This made their titles poor vehicles for increasing the audience for Black characters.

It's going to be a while before the people in various media properties are allowed to simply be people, in all of their disparate traits and confusing contradictions. Right now, many of them are being pressed into service as ambassadors, in the sense that they are not only representations of various groups, but also the representatives of those groups. Personally, I find it an awkward fit, and I look forward to when it doesn't seem so forced.

On Rails

I'm not really a train person. I've ridden Amtrak a few times, mainly back and forth between Seattle and Portland. But I do find trains interesting, especially the wide variety of specialized rail cars to transport specific cargoes. These are fuselage railcars, used to move the bodies of jetliners to and from various factories; such as the Boeing facilities in the area.

Given that Boeing is in the area, I've seen these quite often, but these are actually the first time I've seen a set of them empty.
 

Fight Dud

Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is in the news again, this time after claiming that what seem like a couple of random murders are the start of a coordinated campaign on the part of the Democratic Party to kill Republicans.

"Democrats want Republicans dead," according to Representative Greene, "and they have already started the killings."

I don't know if Representative Greene is sincere, cynical or mentally ill, and in the end, it doesn't matter. Because she isn't the problem. The idea that, in a nation where violence is endemic, that two random incidents that escalated to violence are part of some sort of coordinated campaign is the problem. Or rather, that there are people who are eager enough to believe that they've become targets that this makes sense is the problem.

Of course, Republicans aren't alone in this. The only surprising thing is how late they are to this particular tactic. Taking the actions of a few individuals in a nation of 330-plus million and making those out to be indicative of some broad nationwide trend is practically a profession for any number of people.

As I see it, there's a weird sense of safety in these things. Because the enemy is always implacably hateful, yet clearly incompetent. If people in Rwanda could engage in a widespread massacre of their fellow citizens with machetes and sticks, it stands to reason that in a nation with as many guns as the United States, mass targeting of Republicans would be pretty straightforward. If, as Republican filmmaker Dinesh D'Sousa claims, the Democrats were able to round up hundreds of people to steal an election, it seems that they could round up more than a couple of people to commit lethal political violence.

In any event, it's identity politics being weird again. It won't be the last time.

Fractured

People in the United States spend a lot of time arguing about Capitalism. There are two broad camps, and they tend to ask different questions. For one camp the question boils down to: "Capitalism: Wonderful or terrific?" while the other tends to ask: "Capitalism: Threat or menace?" Each side understands its particular worldview as self-evident, and so reacts with mistrust to those people who share the opposite view. Or any other view, for that matter.

Many of the people I know tend to lean Liberal in their politics, and so suspicion of Capitalism runs high. Mainly because of ideas that a) the primary purpose of societies should be to care for the well-being and actualization of their members and b) Capitalism actively opposes that purpose. On the Conservative side of my social circles, things are a little less clear. Most of the Conservatives I know as less economically conservative than they are religiously conservative, and a lot of their opposition to what they understand as "Socialism," comes from the fact that the government of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was, and the government of the People's Republic of China is, officially atheist. (Although perhaps simply non-Christian is a better way of putting it.) Therefore there is a certain degree to which their support for Capitalism comes across as because "God wills it." However, a case can be made that they also believe that a) the primary purpose of societies should be to care for the well-being and actualization of their members and b) Capitalism actively promotes that purpose.

For my own part, I am dubious of both sets of claims. Mainly because I have long been of the opinion that there is no set of institutions or ideologies that humans can create that will substantially alter the motivations and goals of the humans that comprise them.

In other words, the problem with America is the Americans, and changing the system(s) of economics and/or governance is not going to solve that particular problem. While some of my more Progressive friends hold up the Scandinavian nations as examples of what a well-functioning and caring society could (and should) look like in the United States, the social democracies of the Nordic countries did not create the impulse for their citizens to take an active interest in each other's well-being. Rather that impulse shaped the social democracies they created. Likewise, the counter-example than many Reactionaries cite, Venezuela, wasn't brought down because they were doing Socialism as intended; the problem was that late President Hugo Chavez instituted his reforms as a means of class warfare, and the classes (and a lot of other Venezuelans, it seems) are still at war. By the same token, the constant conflicts that ripple across the United States are not the result of either too much, or not enough, Capitalism or Socialism, but because of a general inability of the people of the United States to see one another as all having a certain shared set of interests. And, as much as I dislike the phrasing, I suspect one could go so far as to say that Americans routinely fail to credit one another with even shared humanity.

And without that underlying unity, the rest of it simply doesn't matter. No form of government, economics or religion (or lack thereof) is going to change the degree to which Americans see one another as worthy of having their well-being and actualization cared for.

The problem with premise a) which I put as: the primary purpose of societies should be to care for the well-being and actualization of their members is not that many think of it as false. Rather, the premise is somewhat overly broad. Because I think that a lot of people feel that the primary purpose of societies should be to care for the well-being and actualization of the just, law (and/or norms)-abiding and right-thinking among them. And in this sense, the degree to which Liberals feel that they fare poorly under Capitalism and Conservatives fear that Socialism would be punitive and impoverishing for them are features, rather than bugs. And no system can create unity and shared prosperity when the motivation behind implementing it is to punish those who dissent from The Right Way of Doing Things.

The history of the United States is rife with examples of one group of people doing better for themselves by shifting the costs of their benefits to one or more other groups of people, either because it was presumed that them bearing those costs was simply their natural lot in life, that they had otherwise shown themselves undeserving of prosperity or were simply out of sight and out of mind. And the discussion of who should pay for the benefits of others has yet to be taken off the table.